NTFS Support on OSX El Capitan

28 Sep 2014

Mounting NTFS formatted drives on OSX has always been a pain, and I seem to forget how to get it to work every time.
Here’s the instructions for my future self when I’m tearing my hair out trying to make this work.

NOTE:
This was originally written for OSX Mavericks,
but has been updated to work with Yosemite and El Capitan.
You just need to skip a couple of steps (as mentioned below)
if you’re using Mavericks or older versions of OSX.

NTFS-3G is an open source implementation of NTFS and is available via homebrew.
It depends on osxfuse, which you can install using the dmg file available in the
releases page.

Next, install ntfs-3g using homebrew.

brew install homebrew/fuse/ntfs-3g

If you’re on OSX Yosemite or higher, the next step might be a bit tricky.
Apple has introduced System Integrity Protection (SIP),
a security feature, which prevents writing to the /sbin path.

To get around this, we will need to disable SIP by using recovery mode.
(You can skip the steps to disable SIP if you’re on Mavericks or earlier.)

Steps to disable SIP:

Reboot the Mac, and hold Cmd+R to boot into recovery mode.

Open terminal (Utilities > Terminal in the menu bar)

Run the command csrutil disable.

Reboot and continue with the following steps.

Now we can use ntfs-3g’s drivers to access NTFS drives.
The following commands back up the original /sbin/mount_ntfs file
and link the version provided by ntfs-3g instead.

You now need to reboot your Mac to get it to work.
Once you’ve checked that everything is working fine,
it’s a good idea to enable SIP once the setup is done.
To do this, follow the steps mentioned above for disabling,
but replace csrutil disable with csrutil enable.

Hi, I’m Nithin Bekal.
I work at Shopify in Ottawa, Canada.
Previously, co-founder of
CrowdStudio.in and
WowMakers.
Ruby is my preferred programming language,
and the topic of most of my articles here,
but I'm also a big fan of Elixir.
Tweet to me at @nithinbekal.